10 Million Jobs in 10 Years

We Americans are at our best when we have faith in our ability to reinvent our future. From our founding days to now, we have been a nation of revolutionary wanderers, immigrants to a new land, filled with the wanderlust of what is possible if we only set forth and try to realize our dreams for our futures. America is a nation of entrepreneurial spirits. It is time for our government to reflect our entrepreneurial roots and spirit and act in concert and accord with us.

Luckily, we have elected a president in Barack Obama who has spent an incredible amount of time meeting with American entrepreneurs and listening to our ideas. As a co-chair of Tech for Obama, I helped conceive of and implement — with Jim Green — a series of Tech Roundtables throughout 2011 and 2012. Through eight roundtables with more than 140 entrepreneurs, I was able to witness President Obama’s deep commitment to listening to new ideas for America and American entrepreneurship. As a co-founder of the Startup Visa movement three years ago, I was witness to the transformation that occurred in Silicon Valley in our engagement in public policy, and our realization that we cannot stay in reactive mode, but must graduate to a proactive participation in our democracy.

Inspired by President Obama and entrepreneurs, I wrote “10 for 10,” which is a framework and proposal to galvanize American entrepreneurship to create 10 million new jobs in 10 years. This proposal is wholly my own, and is not endorsed by anyone in the government or any other organization.

“10 for 10” proposes that the government join forces with the American business and entrepreneurship community to sign up for a specific goal of creating 10 million new jobs in America in the next 10 years. The majority of these jobs will be related to the technology sector. The nature of these jobs will have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of sustainable impact on the American economy. The ideas in this proposal are the beginnings of a framework for the creation of those 10 million jobs.

I wrote “10 for 10” at the end of November 2012, weeks after the election, and shared it with key people in the White House — and now I share this plan with you. Here’s to hoping that some of these ideas take flight.

Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar, a co-CEO of Sherpa Foundry and Venture Advisor at Menlo Ventures, has worked closely with a lot of Web 2.0’s hottest startups, such as Uber, Fab and Warby Parker, while also leading Menlo’s investment in Tumblr. An active angel investor, he has also started a number of companies, such as the Social Gaming Network, which was merged with Mindjolt and Webs.com, which was acquired by Vistaprint for $117.5m in cash.

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